Not long ago I created a demonstration that highlighted the new support for the PowerVM platform introduced in WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1. In that demonstration I showed how you can deploy to a PowerVM cloud by defining a new cloud group that interfaces with a VMControl instance to manage a pSeries cloud environment. However, in the demo I did not go into much detail about the components of a pSeries cloud used with WebSphere CloudBurst.

Since pictures help me out a lot, I thought I’d start the discussion with an image that depicts the components in the pSeries cloud environment and the workflow when using WebSphere CloudBurst to deploy systems to this environment.

The workflow begins when a user requests the deployment of a pattern and targets that deployment for a PowerVM cloud group. WebSphere CloudBurst first checks that the cloud group contains the compute resources necessary to deploy the pattern. After the resource checks are complete, WebSphere CloudBurst decides where to place each virtual machine that will be created from deployment using its intelligent placement algorithm. No matter the type of the cloud environment being utilized the appliance retains control over placement decisions, thus ensuring the virtual system has been deployed in a way that optimizes both performance and availability.

Once the placement decision has been made, WebSphere CloudBurst communicates with the VMControl instance, which in turn instructs the Hardware Management Console (HMC) to create LPARs on the targeted pSeries machines. These LPARs will host the virtual machines that represent the WebSphere Application Server nodes in your virtual system. After the LPARs have been created, WebSphere CloudBurst leverages VMControl to instruct the Network Installation Manager (NIM) to deploy virtual images to the necessary LPARs.

When the LPARs have been created and the virtual images have been deployed to those LPARs, the common process of virtual system creation can proceed. This process includes starting virtual machines, starting WebSphere Application Server components, and running any user-supplied scripts. The end result is a ready to use, virtualized WebSphere Application Server cell running on the PowerVM hypervisor platform.

I hope this provides a nice overview of the underlying environment when PowerVM hypervisors are used with WebSphere CloudBurst. As for those users who are not WebSphere CloudBurst cloud administrators, the information above is nice to know but not necessary. The user experience with respect to building, deploying, and managing your virtualized application environments with WebSphere CloudBurst is consistent regardless of the type of your cloud platform.